COMMENTARY: A Gulf Coast Like a Buddhist Sand Painting Swept Away

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Tibetan Buddhists turn life’s impermanence into art. Over the course of several days, they create complex, colorful sand paintings called mandalas, forming an intricate diagram of the enlightened mind and an ideal world. Then, they sweep the sand away and pour it in a river, to acknowledge the transience […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Tibetan Buddhists turn life’s impermanence into art. Over the course of several days, they create complex, colorful sand paintings called mandalas, forming an intricate diagram of the enlightened mind and an ideal world. Then, they sweep the sand away and pour it in a river, to acknowledge the transience of all material things.

The Gulf Coast today is a kind of cultural mandala: lives, buildings and belongings swept away by ferocious winds and floodwaters. Some see the wrathful hand of God doing the sweeping with a Scripture-sized flood; others blame the wages of environmental sin; most behold a random act of nature at its most fearsome.


Something like the tsunami has come to our shores, and we shudder at its awesome power. As usual, the poor and powerless bear the brunt of nature’s cruelty.

Katrina’s claw has ripped away most of a major city and peeled off the fragile shell of civilization. What’s left is a piteous pool of wreckage and plunder, reminding us what a thin layer separates the common comforts we call daily life from desperation and savagery.

New Orleans’ once-intricate diagram of life is now a 20-foot-deep soup of trash and death. Homes that used to buzz happily with DVDs and children playing lie submerged like shipwrecks. Happy honky-tonks and ritzy restaurants are swamps. People cry for help from rooftops and beg for fresh water.

While the destruction is mind-numbing, the degradation is chilling. To see people toting TVs and carrying plastic bags filled with cosmetics cuts a bit too close to our worst suspicions of human nature. Take away the police and the stop signs, the fear goes, and we all revert to barbarism.

Is moral behavior merely a side benefit of relative comfort, to be discarded for ruthless self-preservation when the controls come off? Let’s not go there.

The hooligans who held up a medical supply truck and hijacked a nursing-home bus are reprehensible. But for every one of them, there are rescue workers and Red Cross volunteers out risking their lives to save others.

Natural disaster brings out the best and worst in us. In the weeks and months to come, the worst will play itself out, but the best will shine. Volunteers will pour into Louisiana and Mississippi like healing antibodies to a wound.


We all want to know what we can do to help. It is a helpless feeling but, ultimately, a good thing. It goes to our basic compassion in the face of disaster, an impulse that, in turn, strengthens faith. We want to be, if you will, the hands of God.

But hand-in-hand with faith comes the knowledge of how easily all we know and depend upon can be torn away.

What, at that point, is life made of? What or who do you fall back upon? God? It was God who caused this because of our sin, or so some say. He sure didn’t stop it. And I’m supposed to take my grief to God?

Well, yes. It’s relatively easy to chalk up natural disaster to God’s fury. It’s much harder to act on the belief God gave us the compassion that lifts us above savagery, the skills to save and rebuild lives and the intelligence to mitigate future disasters.

When the shell of civilization is ripped away, those gifts remain.

If we act upon them, love will survive when the sand washes away.

MO/JL END RNS

(Charles Honey writes about religion for The Grand Rapids Press in Grand Rapids, Mich.)

Editors: To obtain a photo of Honey, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

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